Chapter 1 of a whole new book begins on [Totally Fantastic Title]. Introducing, Griffin and the Spurious Correlations.
This book is probably the most fun I ever had writing a story. Well, I guess it is tied with The Pageant — A Battle Maiden’s Cunning Stunt. That was a hoot too. Griffin I found easier to write than the Gatekeeper series, in part I think because it’s contemporary. It’s a helluva lot easier to come up with similes and metaphors when you don’t have to worry about anachronism. Plus it was just great fun to let my imagination take over. The events that happen in the book just kind of flowed uninterrupted out of my fingers, the pen, the keyboard, whatever. There was nothing in the way, no obstacle, nothing blocking the ideas. It was enormously fun to write, and after getting comments from four beta readers, it was enormously fun to revise and rework.
And the really interesting thing is that ages after writing this book I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, which is a book on story structure aimed at writing film, but it can be applied to writing novels as well. I am not a proponent of writing a story trying to jam it into The Hero’s or Heroine’s Journey, or whatever story structure outline theory you like. I’m more a fan of writing the story instinctively and then seeing how it aligns with one of those theories, and making adjustments if you feel like it. I read Save the Cat long after finishing Griffin and was kind of blown away at how closely it aligned with Snyder’s beat structure. So that was kind of cool. Just an observation, really.
Only it was then that I realised the truth: I started out writing a contemporary fantasy novel. But I realised that the central theme… is the romance. I was kind of shocked to have to admit it: I had written a romance novel. Once I embraced that, all the tweaking was easy.
The point is that this book was so fun to write, and I laughed a lot and I will probably laugh a lot when recording it. I hope you do too.